Chris Matthews & What He Saw

I was trying to think about who he was tonight. It’s interesting; he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. He’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and past so much history in just a year or two. I mean it’s something we don’t even think about. I was watching and I said, wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people and there he is, president of the United States, and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight – completely forgotten it. I think it was in the scope of the discussion, it was so broad ranging, so in tune with so many problems and aspects and aspects of American life. That you don’t think in terms of the old tribalism and the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard, a very subtle fact. It’s so hard to even talk about it. Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it.

It’s pretty clear that Chris Matthews is kinda losing it these days. Still, I think I know what he’s saying. One just has to think like a liberal to get it.

Guys like Chris Matthews, identity politics guys, see everything through the lens of race. The president was the First Black President more than he was the best President for the U.S.

For hippies, Barack Obama was a racial symbol. They wanted to see tangible, physical, brown-skinned, or ovaried (but that comes second in identity politics–ladies, wait your turn and by the way, be liberal) human in charge. The skin tone mattered first.

Last night, Chris Matthews stopped being race-focused and he started actually listening to the message.

The funny thing is that nearly all those who didn’t vote for Barack Obama heard the message two years ago. They didn’t see race first. They saw a man with whom they disagreed.

Who is racist here?

That doesn’t mean that there still aren’t people who are racist or sexist or ageist or, in the case of a lot of women, painfully jealous of a woman more beautiful than she; there are “ist” people. People discriminate. It’s what they do.

For guys like Chris Matthews who exclude or include purely on skin color, finally hearing the message is revelatory.

Chris Matthews admits to a phenomenon that’s probably happening all across America: He’s finally hearing the message and not getting lost in the “light-skinned, negro” package as Harry Reid would say.

It’s about time that the identity-politics crowd start seeing Barack Obama as a fully formed human being and not the two-dimensional black card-board cut out hero.

It’s about time these people start looking at their fellow Americans not as some aggrieved minority–for surely that view diminishes the human being and strips him or her of her humanity and individuality. The aggrieved minority is not so much a person as a “black person” with all the prejudices that a white guy like Chris Matthews applies.

Maybe now, the racists on the left can start seeing what most Americans saw when they see Barack Obama: A man like any other.